Open Library

Viewing posts from the Open Library category

A brief description of me on the Pratham blog referred to me as an occasional blogger. Well! I have to do something about that. So here goes and if you are bored, so be it.

For a year and a half now I have been on a sub-committee of the Karnataka Knowledge Commission. Before you drop off, I’ll cut to the chase and say that in a recent initiative, 225 high schools in the state, mainly in the rural areas were to be given an initial collection of books, a user-friendly manual and the teacher/librarians would attend a workshop to brainstorm together how to bring about an active, open library in their schools.(This event is happening day after tomorrow. Wish us luuck!) So we first sent off a request to a few authors, NGOs working with schoolchildren, teachers and librarians to send us their recommended list.Having gathered this list, the job of sifting through these lists and making a selection fell on the worthy shoulders of Leela Garady, a former teacher at CFL and a children’s author. Along with Prakash Kamath, an NGO who had helped set up the Teacher’s Resource Centre at Chamarajanagar, she painstakingly put together a laudable list of books in Kannada. Meanwhile with inputs from Kavery Nambisan and other children’s writers, publishers and our own collection at CFL, I put down a list of books in English. Both languages had some reference books too. Apart from this we included some A/V material too. The next task was to write a really supportive, user-friendly and hands-on manual. Elsewhere here on this blog is a copy for you to read and judge. This was then translated brilliantly into Kannada by Leela Garady and is coming out (fingers and toes crossed) tomorrow!!